ABSTRACT
This letter, which Hu Shi omitted from his selection of Chen’s last writings, shows Chen concerned to protect the good name of Trotsky’s Fourth International in China against the activities of the Chinese Trotskyist “ultra-leftists”, who at the time were denouncing Chen for wanting to ‘put national interests above party interests” in the war against Japan, and thus for “betraying the organisation and betraying himself.‘ Chen notes in his counterattack that the Trotskyists’ passive and even negative attitude toward the war gives credence to the Communist Party’s campaign to paint them as pro-Japanese traitors, a campaign of which Chen himself had been the principal victim. The letter correctly predicts that China will fail to expel the Japanese, yet it seriously underestimates the Communist Party’s prospects under Mao, with his strategy of guerrilla warfare waged independently from rural bases. But though Chen believes that the Trotskyists will only grow when industry (and thus the working class) revives, he insists that abstention from activity is no option, and he urges the Trotskyists to act now, both under Japanese and Nationalist rule, in order to prepare for future political openings. The letter shows that Chen was opposed not to the Chinese Trotskyist organisation as such but to its then leaders; and not to basic Trotskyist theories but to the Chinese Trotskyists’ ultra-left interpretation of them.
